‘Boss, you’d better come’n see.’
Faulks stepped past him with a frown, the tip of his umbrella striking the floor every second step, then froze.
It was empty. Gutted. Stripped clean. The crates, the boxes, the vases, the statues, the safe-everything had gone.
He felt suddenly faint, the room spinning around him, his heart pounding, the blood roaring in his ears. Turning on his heels, he limped back into the first room and threw one of the cupboards open with a crash. Empty. The next one was the same. And the one after that, the metal doors now clanging noisily against each other like shutters in a storm as he jumped from one cupboard to the next. They were all empty.
‘You’ve been fuckin’ turned over,’ Logan growled.
Faulks couldn’t speak, could barely breathe, felt sick. He staggered to the table, his legs threatening to give away under him at any minute, the open cupboard doors still swaying around him as if they were waving goodbye.
What about the files?
Somehow he found the strength to limp through to the third room, Logan following behind, his warning to be careful echoing unheard off the bare walls. Faulks stopped on the threshold, supporting himself against the door frame, not needing to go inside to see that this room too had also been stripped bare.
He had the strange sensation of drowning, of the air being squeezed from his lungs, the pressure clawing at his eardrums, pressing his eyes back into his head. And then he was falling, legs tumbling away from underneath him, back sliding down the wall as the floor rose up to grab him, umbrella toppling on to his lap. Gone. Gone. Everything gone.
‘Earl?’ He heard Verity’s voice echoing towards him. ‘You said five minutes, so I thought I’d come up. Is everything okay?’
SEVENTY-TWO
Free Port, Geneva
20th April-3.36 p.m.
‘He’s gone inside.’ Archie let himself back into the room with a relieved smile. ‘I’ve left Dom watching the stairs. How are you getting on?’
‘Any minute now,’ Tom replied, the air thick with the smell of oil, burnt steel and hot machine parts.
Allegra had been right. Her idea had had no reason to work. And yet, like all good ideas, there had been an elegance and simplicity to it that had at least given it a fighting chance of success.
‘Dominique said all the floors look the same,’ Allegra had reminded them. ‘If she’s right, then maybe we could try and trick Faulks into getting off on the second floor.’
‘It could work,’ Tom had said, immediately catching on. ‘We could rig the lift, swap over the wall signs and door numbers, and then use the forklift to move all his furniture downstairs so that when he goes inside his first thought will be that he’s been robbed.’
‘I’ll reroute the camera feed so the guard can’t see us,’ Dominique had suggested. ‘And we could fix the alarm cover panel to the wall so it at least looks the same.’
‘What about the cupboards?’ Archie had reminded them. ‘We haven’t got time to unload them all.’
‘Check out some of the other empty offices,’ Tom had suggested. ‘There’s bound to be a couple of spares lying around. As long as they look vaguely similar, he’ll be too shocked to notice. And by the time he does, we’ll be long gone with whatever’s inside.’
Tom’s safe-cracking kit was surprisingly simple. A 36-volt Bosch power drill, like you would buy at any normal hardware store. A tungsten-carbide-tipped drill bit shaped for steel cutting. A twenty-millimetre diamond-core drill bit, routinely used in the construction industry. And finally a Fein electro-magnetic drill rig to hold the power drill in place and control the pressure.
The method was relatively straightforward too. First fix the rig on to the side of the safe over the chosen breach point with the magnets. Then clamp the power drill into the rig. Then equip the tungsten carbide drill bit, and lower the drill to bore a centring hole in the steel. Finally swap it for the diamond-core drill bit and punch through.
The tricky part was applying the correct combination of drill speed and pressure at the right time. Puncturing the safe’s steel casing, for example, required drilling at about 2000 rpm with only medium to low pressure applied by the rig. Getting through the composite material underneath, however, demanded high pressure and low revs, maybe 300 rpm. Even then Tom had to go easy, the diamonds clogging in the angled mild steel plates that had been embedded in the concrete. With only one power drill, that meant he had to be careful not to blow the motor, and he was forced to stop at regular intervals and allow it to cool.
‘How are you getting on with the photos?’ Tom called, adding some lubricant.
‘I’ve got a system going-’ Allegra poked her head into the room -‘I won’t get them all, but I’ll get enough.’
‘Anything that might tell us where the League are meeting tonight?’
‘No, but I’ll keep looking.’
At last the drill punched through, the motor racing wildly.
‘That’s it,’ Tom called, fumbling for the off switch and then heaving the rig out of the way.
‘Here-’ Archie handed him a small monitor that he taped to the side of the safe and then connected to the borescope. The screen flickered with light, indicating it was working.
‘Ready?’ Tom looked up with a hopeful smile at Allegra, who had run across to join them. She nodded silently as he blew against the hole to cool the scorched metal and then slipped the cable inside.
‘Look,’ she gasped almost immediately. The outline of a white face was framed on the small screen like a human skull, the grainy image looking like it was being broadcast up through the depths from a long-lost shipwreck. ‘It’s the ivory mask. Cavalli must have sent it here before he was killed.’
‘They must have been working together,’ agreed Tom. ‘Cavalli supplying the antiquities and Faulks providing the buyers. That way, they didn’t have to split the profits with the Delian League.’
‘Faulks doesn’t have to split anything with anyone now that Cavalli’s dead,’ Allegra observed wryly.
‘Pretty convenient,’ Tom agreed. ‘It wouldn’t surprise me if…’ He broke off, a sudden thought occurring to him. Of course. It had been so simple. So easy. And once Faulks had realised how much the mask was worth, so necessary.
‘Oi, you two,’ Archie interrupted. ‘Holmes and bloody Watson. Do you mind if we get a move on?’
Tom winked at Allegra, then nodded. He was right.
Looking back to the screen to get his bearings, he bent the cable towards the left and found the back of the safe door. Then he slowly moved it along until he was roughly behind the combination dial.
‘There it is,’ Archie said sharply.
‘There what is?’ Allegra leant closer with a frown.
‘The key-change hole,’ Archie explained. ‘Every combination safe comes with a special key that you insert in that hole when the safe’s open to change the code.’
‘How big is the hole?’
‘Not very,’ Tom said, jaw clenched in concentration.
‘Not big enough,’ Archie muttered under his breath. ‘That’s the problem.’
They watched the image silently, the camera’s proximity making the tiny hole look surprisingly large on the screen, the cable catching on its edge as Tom tried to nudge it inside.
‘Shit,’ he hissed, the cable slipping past yet again. ‘It keeps sliding off.’
‘Try from the other side,’ Archie suggested.
‘I’ve done that,’ Tom snapped, smearing oil across his forehead as he wiped the sweat away.
Dominique came in, out of breath from having run up the stairs.
‘How much time have we got?’ Tom barked without looking up.
‘About as much time as it takes them to look out the window and realise they’re only two floors up. How are we doing?’